Humble Pie

The day I never thought would come arrived December 25 (maybe the Mayans were right after all…?)

Yes, I confess, I now own an e-reader, specifically a Kobo Mini.

It’s a wee little guy. According to the specs on the Kobo Web site, it measures 4″x5.2″x0.4″. I’ll take their word for it, I’m too lazy to bother dredging up a ruler to measure it.

It’s about as tall as five stacked paperbacks, so it fits nicely in the hand. My only regret about this thing is it doesn’t have the light for reading in the dark like the Kobo Glo (Kobo people, are we working on that, hmm? hint-hint, nudge-nudge). If a little cell phone can have a lighted screen there’s no reason they can work one into this thing somehow.

So I’ve been loading up on free ebooks, courtesy of Project Gutenberg, starting out with the classics like my beloved Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Edith Wharton, Charles Darwin, John Keats, Bram Stoker. So yeah, it’s pretty cool being able to pull up whatever strikes your fancy, or you know all those times when you’re trying to remember a quote or favorite line from a book and you can look it up (provided you have it on the device). Yes, I have all Austen’s books already, and Wuthering Heights, and Dracula, most of Dickens, Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it’ll be handy having them along just to reread a favorite passage in a few spare minutes.

The e-ink is very good, very clear, it really looks like ink on paper, maybe even a little sharper. I wish my pictures came out better but you can see better images on Kobo’s site. There’s also a “Reading Life” function, which gives you the chance to earn various awards and connect with other readers (not entirely sure yet what it’s all about, I’m guessing it’s their version of Goodreads.com, but it looks fun).

I admit it. I like this thing. It went with me to my doctor’s appointment yesterday, safely tucked in one of my gorgeous Tarot bags from Baba Studio. You can adjust the font, text size, line spacing, all kinds of stuff. You can get definitions, search, annotate, translate.

And, if you get tired of reading, you can even play games or surf the Web with it. Chess, anyone? Zoom if you need it.

Black andwhite only, but it’s there if you need it.

I haven’t even had a chance to try out all this stuff yet, but the geek in me is loving it. I’m not ready to give up paper books, but this is fun. There, I said it. It’s a fun little gizmo. Now, what happens if I lose it and any books I’ve paid for I don’t know. Free books are easy enough to replace, and possibly any bought through Kobo’s store, but this thing can read multiple formats (except Kindle, which is proprietary to Amazon’s reader) like Epub, PDF, Mobi and others. That’s one of the reasons I was interested in these about a month ago. Powells has had them on sale for $50 a couple of times already. Keep an eye out if you’re interested.

So, this wasn’t intended to be an ad for these things, I just wanted to point out some of the features in case anyone was wondering what all they can do. I know when I looked at them at Powells it was hard to know what to even ask the salesperson since I knew so little about them only a short month ago.

This pie really isn’t as bad as I expected.

(apologies for the fuzzy pictures, again I was too lazy to haul out the tripod and do them right)